Source: United States Senator for Connecticut – Chris Murphy
WASHINGTON—In the wake of the tragic shootings in Buffalo and Laguna Woods, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Wednesday took to the U.S. Senate floor to lay out the unique nature and history of American violence. Murphy called out Republicans who have chosen to exacerbate America’s predilection toward violence in their decision to espouse hate and fear.
On Republicans’ embrace of former President Trump’s hateful, racist rhetoric, Murphy said: “The most visible political figure in America, Donald Trump, has spent the last decade relentlessly spreading the gospel of fear and anxiety and hate…There’s a straight line from this embrace of racism and fear to the increase in violence in this country. I know many of my Republican colleagues don’t use the same terminology, the same language that Trump does, but they know the danger he poses to this nation. They know that his movement has egged on violence, and they do nothing about it…Knowing America’s natural predilection towards violence, Republicans could have chosen to embrace leaders who seek to unite us, who would choose to push back against this tendency for Americans to be wary of each other. Instead, they did the opposite, and we’re paying the price.”
Murphy highlighted that level of American violence is a choice we make: “It’s up to us whether we want to spend every hour of every day trying to mitigate this predilection towards violence or whether we want to choose to exacerbate it. Fueling the kind of racist, hateful fear of your neighbor demagoguery practiced by Donald Trump, it exacerbates American violence. Doing nothing year after year about the flow of illegal and high powered weapons into our streets exacerbates American violence.”
Murphy continued: “Kids living in fear that their classroom is the next one to get shot up. That’s not inevitable. It’s a choice. Black shoppers looking over their shoulder, wondering whether this is the day that they die. That doesn’t have to be our reality. That’s a choice.”
“We can look into the flames of American violence, this fire that’s been burning since our inception, and we can choose to douse the fire or we can choose to continue to pour fuel on top of it,” Murphy concluded.
A full transcript of his remarks can be found below:
MURPHY: “Mr. President, the conventional wisdom is that one of the adaptations that helped humans separate ourselves from all over all species is this: the opposable thumb.
“The theory goes that the transformation of the thumb, able to operate by itself independently from the rest of our fingers, it allowed humans to be able to manipulate objects with a level of precision and dexterity that was previously unseen in the animal kingdom, and this newly nimble hand, it allowed humans to, for instance, more easily catch fish and open fruit, pull out the seeds. This newfound bounty of fats and proteins, it vaulted the human brain into developmental overdrive.
“But about 10 years ago, biologist David Carrier, a longtime student of the evolution of the human hand, proposed a different theory. What if the primary utility of the opposable thumb was not to do this but instead this. The ability to tuck your thumb into the middle of your four fingers immediately gave humans a more effective fighting tool — important since we lacked tusks or fangs, or claws like other animals.
“Maybe the development that mattered most to human development was the one that allowed us to become more effective fighters. Not just with predators, but with ourselves. Because from the beginning, as a species humans have been drawn to violence. In fact, there are a few species, few mammals that are more violent than humans.
“There’s a really interesting study of intraspecies violence, meaning when you conduct a violent act against another member of your species, and these researchers looked at over a thousand mammals. What’s interesting is that 60% of mammals actually have zero, intraspecies violence. Bats and whales, they never attack each other. That tells you something in and of itself, that it’s not endemic to mammals to be violent.
“But what the data showed is that right at the top of that list of those one thousands species when it came to the rates of interest, species violence: humans.
“Biologists trace our violence back to our earliest days. Without those tusks or fangs, humans could really only survive by grouping ourselves tightly together. We were quickly rewarded socially and materially for joining up in groups. But with resources scarce in the early human world, to survive, you had to find a group and then you had to defend it. Defend it against other humans who were competing with you for those same resources.
“Intertribal violence was epidemic in this world, in the early days of humans. In the Bronze Age, estimates suggest that one out of every three humans died a violent death at the hands of another human. Records suggests that in pre-Columbian America, as many as one out of four Native Americans died violently.
“The primary reason? Humans have an in-group bias. To survive, in those early days, we needed to group ourselves tightly together, and view with fear and skepticism members of other outside groups who are competitors for those scarce resources.
“And centuries and centuries of human development have hardwired this in-group bias, this anxiety about out-groups into our genetics.
“One 2012 study determined that today, when an individual first meets a person that’s perceived to be outside of one’s defined social group, individuals demonstrate immediate, almost automatic instinct of anxiety and a surge of intention to act on that anxiety. It’s not conscious — it’s genetic.
“And so if humans are hardwired to view out-group members as suspicious and to act on those suspicions, sometimes violently, then America was destined by design to be an abnormally violent place.
“Why do I say that? First, let’s just be totally honest with ourselves. Our nation was founded through the use of mass scale violence. There are lots of people who are trying to erase these parts of our history as if there’s some weakness in admitting the truth about our past. That’s ridiculous.
“We should just tell the truth about our history, and the truth is that we exterminated Native Americans in order to gain control of this land. We enslaved millions of Africans and used daily epidemic levels of violence, beatings, weapons, lynchings, to keep these people enslaved.
“From the start, we were a nation bathed in violence, and we became a little immune, a little anesthetized to violence in those early days.
“And our decision to build a melting pot of ethnicities and races and religions, it’s our genius, right? It’s our superpower as a nation. It’s why we catapulted the rest of the world to economic and political dominance, but it also set us up as a nation with built in rivalries, with easily defined groupings and easily exploited suspicions of those who aren’t part of your group.
“This combination, epidemic levels of violence in our early days that continued throughout our history, and built in tensions between easily defined groups, it ensured that America would be a place with a higher tolerance for and a higher risk of violence.
“Okay, that’s the end of the history lesson. But it’s important to set this frame because this generation, our generation of Americans, we inherited this history. We can’t do anything about that. We were born into it and became citizens of a nation with a past. A past that does make us a little bit more prone to violence than other places.
“The question really is simply this: What are we going to do? Do we acknowledge this lean towards violence and takes steps to mitigate it? That of course would be the common sense approach.
“Instead, we have done the opposite. Throughout American history, hateful demagogic leaders have found political capital to be gained by playing upon people’s instinct to fear others that aren’t part of their group. Again, so easy in a multicultural America.
“From Orval Faubus to Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, there is an ugly tradition in American politics of leaders trying to drum up irrational fears of Blacks or immigrants or Muslims, gay people, or Hispanics or Jews. Racism, xenophobia, homophobia, they’ve all been tools of leaders who seek to build followings by convincing people to organize around their fear or hatred of others.
“The Buffalo shooter’s manifesto is a tribute to this tradition. But he is not alone. The FBI’s latest hate crimes report shows a dramatic spike in this country in crimes of bigotry and racism. Most alarming was a 40% increase in 2020 in hate crimes against Black Americans, foreshadowing the Buffalo attack.
“And this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. The most visible political figure in America, Donald Trump, has spent the last decade relentlessly spreading the gospel of fear and anxiety and hate. His campaign rollout in 2015 was centered around hyping the threat to America from Mexican immigrants. His most significant campaign policy proposal was to ban all people from this country who practice a certain religion.
“There’s a straight line from this embrace of racism and fear to the increase in violence in this country. I know many of my Republican colleagues don’t use the same terminology, the same language that Trump does, but they know the danger he poses to this nation. They know that his movement has egged on violence, and they do nothing about it. They still accept him as the leader of the party when they had a chance to get rid of him after January 6th. Republicans go to Florida, they kiss the ring, they appear on Fox shows that spread this message, they empower the message.
“Knowing America’s natural predilection towards violence, Republicans could have chosen to embrace leaders who seek to unite us, who would choose to push back against this tendency for Americans to be wary of each other.
“Instead, they did the opposite, and we’re paying the price. The other way that our nation could have chosen to mitigate our violent instincts is to make sure that when American violence does occur, it does the least damage possible. This is commonly referred to in public health circles as harm reduction. If you can’t completely and totally prevent the harm, then just make sure that it’s glancing rather than catastrophic.
“Instead, America, once again, has adopted the opposite strategy, a strategy of harm maximization. We are, as I’ve told you, a historically violent nation. We know this, and instead of trying to mitigate for this history, we choose to arm our citizenry to the teeth with the most dangerous, the most lethal weapons imaginable, to make sure that when conflict does occur, it ends up with as many people dying as possible. That is a choice that we have made.
“The jumping off point in this choice was in the mid-19th century, when Hartford, Connecticut inventor Samuel Colt built the first repeating revolver, allowing Americans to hide an incredibly lethal weapon in their coat pocket. All of a sudden, drunken street corner arguments which used to result in a few awkward punches thrown, they became deadly.
“In nearly every other country in the high income world at this point in the mid-1800s, they saw this danger and so they decided to regulate the handgun and the weapons that came after to make sure that those arguments stayed fistfights rather than shootouts.
“But America took the other path, we let these weapons spread across the nation and then, as much more deadly guns were developed for the military, our nation decided to go its own way again, and let citizens own and operate these weapons too.
“The result is of course a nation that is awash in guns with no comparison, no comparison, in the high income world. We have more guns in this country on our streets, that human beings, than American citizens. And so it’s no wonder that in this nation everyday arguments, they seamlessly turn into gunfights. Passing suicidal thoughts result in lives ended. And hateful racists can kill efficiently by the dozens.
“I think about December 14th, 2012 all the time. That’s the day that a gunman armed with an assault weapon and 30 round magazines walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and in less than five minutes killed 20 kids and six educators.
“Think about that. Military weapons that this guy was able to own legally killed 26 people in under five minutes. The gun he used was so powerful that not a single child who was shot survived. Those bullets moved so fast, so lethally through their little bodies, just tore them to shreds.
“But on that same day to China, a similarly deranged young man entered a similarly nondescript school and attacked almost the identical number of people. But in that Chinese classroom, every single one of those 23 people that that been attacked, survived. Why? Because in China the attacker had a knife not a military grade assault weapon.
“Like I said, I wish this weren’t true, but our nation has from the jump been more violent than other countries. I can’t, you can’t, none of us can erase this history.
“And I come to the floor today to be honest about the parts of the American story that lead to these high levels of violence that we can control and the parts that we can’t control. It’s up to us whether we want to spend every hour of every day trying to mitigate this predilection towards violence or whether we want to choose to exacerbate it. Fueling the kind of racist, hateful fear of your neighbor demagoguery practiced by Donald Trump, it exacerbates American violence. Doing nothing year after year about the flow of illegal and high powered weapons into our streets exacerbates American violence.
“These are choices we’re making. Kids living in fear that their classroom is the next one to get shot up. That’s not inevitable. It’s a choice. Black shoppers looking over their shoulder, wondering whether this is the day that they die. That doesn’t have to be our reality. That’s a choice.
“We can look into the flames of American violence, this fire that’s been burning since our inception, and we can choose to douse the fire or we can choose to continue to pour fuel on top of it.
“I yield the floor.”
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